Stupid Question

[WildKatz]

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question, however I am a newbie and I need to ask. I just bought a P4C800 and a 3.00 800 FSB CPU and I am wondering what to run for ram with this motherboard. I am looking at the Corsair XMS as well as the Kingston Hyper X in the pc3500 series. Am I better off to run 2 512 MB sticks or 4 256 MB sticks? I don't really understand how the "dual channel" thing works. Do I need to run "matched" sticks or is it just better? Also I am going to move my GeForce 4 4600 TI over from my old system until the Radion 9800 Pro comes out, but I should upgrade my Hard drive. Does anyone make a TRUE serial ATA interface or are they just 133 adapted to serial?

 

[lenjack]

I don't have the answer, but I'd like to say this is not a dumb or stupid question. No need to be sorry.

 

[bgeh]

i'm not sure about your other questions but
seagate and western digital currently make true SATA drives
wd's raptor has 36GB but spins at 10k rpm

 

[oustedone]

Corsair XMS3500 512 meg modules. two of those should do ya! I have the same rig as you and thats the memory I went with. Yes you need two sticks to run dual channel.

 

[oustedone]

Also as far as the serial ATA I would hold off until the drives are out awhile. They are fast but also expensive and capacity is small in comparison to ATA133 drives. Save some dough and go with ata133 so you can get the 9800!

 

[smahoney]

The Seagate drives have true SATA interfaces - The WD360 still uses a Marvel STAT/PATA converter on the drive but it is still very fast. At $155 per drive I would look at something else unless you have to have that kind of performance. The Maxtor SATA drives seem to have pretty good bang for the buck, but they are pretty scarce right now. You might want to hold off till you get your 9800. Command Queueing is still not implemented by any of the vendors yet - WD is supposed to for their next revision but I don't care to guess when that will be shipping and Seagate has gone back to the drawing board for performance reasons.

Not a dumb question though.

As far as memory goes I don't think you can go wrong with either vendor. The dual DDR is going to run synchronously so memory overclocking is not as big of an issue. 2 x 512 should be cheaper and more stable than 4 x 256 and give you room for growth. A pair of XMS-3500 will run about $270 and give you very aggressive timings at DDR400 rates - I have overclocked mine at 2-5-2-2 settings to 212MHz without an issue.

 

[WildKatz]

Thanks for all the help!

 

[ArtemisFowl]

Regarding the raptor - 36 GB is fine for a primary drive. if you need more than 36 GB to house an OS it must be one hell of an OS - even dual boot would be accomodated nicely. who wants to defrag a single 250 GB partition anyway?

only issue i see with the raptor is that it is really oriented towards serving not desktoping. anyone have problems with overheating these new drives?

I will mostly likely be going with a Raptor 36 GB for the OS and a WD SE 80 or greater for applications on one partition and data on one or more other partitions.

I'm also looking at the Asus board with Corsair TwinX (1 GIG total) and the 9800 256 MB

Sounds like my rig will be similar to yours as well.

 

[cirocorby]

just reading and i have the same rig as u do u know why i get a parity error on start up 2 beeps? p4c800 with 2.6 800bus cpu on 2 512 ddr2600?? any help would be realy grate thank u?

 

[WildKatz]

My buddy just built up a 2.4 800 FSB on a P4C800 with 2 x 256 PC3200 of Kingston Hyper X. He was running a 2.4 400 FSB on the board for a while until his 800 came in, then when he swaped it he had MAJOR issues Bios kept requesting an update, the then he got a blue screen, which turned black and he could not boot the thing up, so he got the MOBO warrentied and tried it again, however this time the machine would not boot properly, and kept rebooting it's self. He put the 400FSB cpu back in and everything was fine so he figured he had a bad CPU. After getting the CPU warrentied he tried it yet again and same problem, so he started pulling hte ram out. Turns out he had 1 bad stick of ram (Ram is out right now for warrenty) I am not sure if this will solve the problem but it's our best guess as wel have tried everything else, and the machine runs great on 1 stick of ram, but you put 2 in and it goes stupid. Yes, they are both Kingston Hyper X ram sticks and they were both purchased the same day from the same place, but they were not designed as a matching pair. If all works well when he gets the system back up and running I will let you know.